Monday, July 17, 2006

Bill Clinton’s (possible) half-brother, Arkansas Lt. Gov. Win Rockefeller, has died of a mysterious blood disease. This illness forced him to withdraw from the race for Governor, leaving the race open for the sleazy Asa Hutchinson (see the amazing FortressAmerica story). In 1973, it was Win who announced that his father, Winthrop, the black sheep of the Rockefeller family (largely because he wasn’t evil enough), was withdrawing from his race to be reelected governor, as Winthrop had contracted pancreatic cancer.

In even more Rockefeller-ish news, a usually highly unreliable Russian source is reporting that the mysterious explosion of a doctor’s house in New York, attributed in all the media to the doctor’s wish to commit suicide in the house and destroy it to spitefully deny it to his divorced wife (and complete with a crazy email which, of course, no one can prove actually came from the doctor, and with the complication that the explosion will likely increase the amount that the ex-wife gets!), was actually an attempt on the life of one of the doctor’s patients, Henry Kissinger. This isn’t as crazy as it seems. The doctor was a cardiologist (although almost always described in the media as an emergency medicine specialist), and apparently was regarded as one of the best doctors in New York. Despite being portrayed in the media as a crazed misanthrope, those who knew him only had goodthings to say about him, and don’t feel he would do anything to hurt anybody. In the divorce proceedings, the court accepted the fact that the partly Jewish doctor, who himself fled execution by the Nazis, liked to torment his Jewish wife by posting swastikas around the house (it was in fact the swastikas that formed the main basis for the court’s decision). The court made the unusual ruling that the doctor’s interest in the house, left by the doctor’s parents to the doctor and his daughters, would form part of the assets to be shared by the wife, a decision which eventually led to the upcoming sale of the house.